Search Google Appliance

Art

The National Museum of American History is not an art museum. But works of art fill its collections and testify to the vital place of art in everyday American life. The ceramics collections hold hundreds of examples of American and European art glass and pottery. Fashion sketches, illustrations, and prints are part of the costume collections. Donations from ethnic and cultural communities include many homemade religious ornaments, paintings, and figures. The Harry T Peters "America on Stone" collection alone comprises some 1,700 color prints of scenes from the 1800s. The National Quilt Collection is art on fabric. And the tools of artists and artisans are part of the Museum's collections, too, in the form of printing plates, woodblock tools, photographic equipment, and potters' stamps, kilns, and wheels.

A franchise is a legal document issued by a government or a sovereign granting the right to carry out commercial activities. In Germany franchises were granted to individuals for the privilege of purchasing or inheriting an apothecary, or the exclusive rights to sell a medicinal product within a city or town.

This hand-tooled leather bound document was issued and signed by Pope Leo XII, in 1824 permitting the establishment of a new pharmacy by "Dominus" Paulus Ruga in Rome. The interior of the binding has brown and yellow marbled paper. The pages are hand colored with gold, black, and red ink. Attached to the document by a red and gold cord is a red wax seal housed in a silver-colored oval box with a lid.

A franchise is a legal document issued by a government or a sovereign granting the right to carry out commercial activities. In Germany franchises were granted to individuals for the privilege of purchasing or inheriting an apothecary, or the exclusive rights to sell a medicinal product within a city or town.

This franchise issued in 1728 by German Emperor, Carl IV, granted permission for David Liebel of Nuremberg to "prepare and sell life pills, a nostrum which would insure the user against plague, poisons and all human illness".

The text is hand written in gothic script and elaborately decorated. It is twenty-two pages long and has a red wax seal housed in a round carved wooden box.

A franchise is a legal document issued by a government or a sovereign granting the right to carry out commercial activities. In Germany franchises were granted to individuals for the privilege of purchasing or inheriting an apothecary, or the exclusive rights to sell a medicinal product within a city or town.

This franchise is hand written in gothic script and elaborately decorated. It is twenty-two pages long and has a red wax seal housed in a round carved wooden box. It was issued and signed in Vienna on 20 August 1791, by the German Emperor Leopold II. George Urdang's entry in The Squibb Ancient Pharmacy Catalogue states "In this document, the Emperor confirms an earlier franchise for the production and sale of Trusinger's Healing Plaster, originally granted by Emperor Ferdinand III..."

Carved octagonal wooden mortar and turned wooden pestle. The pestle has a knob finial and the lower portion of the pestle is scored. The mortar and pestle are probably not original to each other. Urdang felt the form of this mortar to be typical of those found throughout the Rhine River Valley.

Gothic beaker-shaped body with a squareish handle and flared mouth. There are five tapering vertical ribs on the body which terminate in paw feet.

Urdang believes this mortar to be of Germanic origin from the 15th century. Testing with an X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometer was unable to conclusively determine the type of metal used in the manufacture of this mortar.